CVE-2024-31497: Secret Key Recovery of NIST P-521 Private Keys Through Biased ECDSA Nonces in PuTTY Client

First published: Mon Apr 15 2024(Updated: )

In PuTTY 0.68 through 0.80 before 0.81, biased ECDSA nonce generation allows an attacker to recover a user's NIST P-521 secret key via a quick attack in approximately 60 signatures. This is especially important in a scenario where an adversary is able to read messages signed by PuTTY or Pageant. One scenario is that the adversary is an operator of an SSH server to which the victim authenticates (for remote login or file copy), even though this server is not fully trusted by the victim, and the victim uses the same private key for SSH connections to other services operated by other entities. Here, the rogue server operator (who would otherwise have no way to determine the victim's private key) can derive the victim's private key, and then use it for unauthorized access to those other services. Because SSH is sometimes used to authenticate to Git services, it is possible that this vulnerability could be leveraged for supply-chain attacks on software maintained in Git. It is also conceivable that signed messages from PuTTY or Pageant are readable by adversaries more easily in other scenarios, but none have yet been disclosed. ### Affected Products - PuTTY 0.68 - 0.80 The following (not necessarily complete) list of products bundle an affected PuTTY version and are therefore vulnerable as well: - FileZilla 3.24.1 - 3.66.5 - WinSCP 5.9.5 - 6.3.2 - TortoiseGit 2.4.0.2 - 2.15.0 - TortoiseSVN 1.10.0 - 1.14.6 ### Impact The nonce bias allows for full secret key recovery of NIST P-521 keys after a malicious actor has seen roughly 60 valid ECDSA signatures generated by any PuTTY component under the same key. Luckily, client signatures are transmitted within the secure channel of SSH, requiring a malicious server to acquire such signatures. If the key has been used to sign arbitrary data (e.g., git commits by forwarding Pageant to a development host), the publicly available signatures (e.g., on GitHub) can be used as well. All NIST P-521 client keys used with PuTTY must be considered compromised, given that the attack can be carried out even after the root cause has been fixed in the source code (assuming that ~60 pre-patch signatures are available to an adversary). ### Mitigations This vulnerability has been fixed in PuTTY 0.81, FileZilla 3.67.0, WinSCP 6.3.3, and TortoiseGit 2.15.0.1. Users of TortoiseSVN are advised to configure TortoiseSVN to use Plink from the latest PuTTY 0.81 release when accessing a SVN repository via SSH until a patch becomes available. ECDSA NIST-P521 keys used with any vulnerable product / component should be considered compromised and consequently revoked by removing them from authorized_keys, GitHub, ... References: <a href="https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/changes.html">https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/changes.html</a> <a href="https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/vuln-p521-bias.html">https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/vuln-p521-bias.html</a>

Credit: cve@mitre.org

Affected Software	Affected Version	How to fix
redhat/PuTTY	<0.81	0.81
redhat/FileZilla	<3.67.0	3.67.0
Putty Putty	>=0.68<0.81
Filezilla-project Filezilla Client	<3.67.0
Winscp Winscp	<6.3.3
Tortoisegit Tortoisegit	<2.15.0.1
Tigris Tortoisesvn	<1.14.6
Fedoraproject Fedora	=38
Fedoraproject Fedora	=39
Fedoraproject Fedora	=40
debian/filezilla	<=3.39.0-2+deb10u1<=3.52.2-3+deb11u1<=3.63.0-1+deb12u3	3.67.0-1
debian/putty	<=0.70-6<=0.74-1+deb11u1~deb10u1<=0.74-1+deb11u1<=0.78-2+deb12u1	0.81-1

Remedy

https://git.tartarus.org/?h=c193fe9848f50a88a4089aac647fecc31ae96d27&p=simon/putty.git

CVE-2024-31497: Secret Key Recovery of NIST P-521 Private Keys Through Biased ECDSA Nonces in PuTTY Client

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